68
The ICCM Journal | Spring 2022 | V90 No. 1
cemeteries are a great home for an ethical funeral director The story of finding a new home for Poppy's, an environmental and community friendly company. At Poppy’s, the fresh approach we take to funerals means we want our clients to feel welcome, considered, empowered and supported in our company and in our physical environments. We want people to have a memorable, meaningful and beautiful experience and we want our spaces to play their part in exceeding our clients’ expectations. So on the search for a permanent and beautiful headquarters for Poppy’s in 2015, we had many questions about how we might achieve this in our physical spaces. How do we transform and raise expectations about the experience of organising a funeral? How do we make people feel safe and confident? How do we quickly build a trusting relationship when our clients are naturally scared, vulnerable and disempowered? How do we work against the cliché of funeral directors, and particularly mortuaries, as scary or closed places? And above all, how do we create a beautiful space for the dead that is inspiring and inviting? There were important logistical considerations too. We knew our dead clients needed to be on site with us. I believe the worst of the horrors in the media (and which we see in practice at other mortuaries) regarding poor care for the dead stem from the traditional silo-ing of mortuary workers from funeral arrangers. If you are collecting people who have died all day every day and you don’t get the opportunity to ‘place’ them in the communities of those who love them, people start to lose the sense of purpose behind their work. To me, this helps to explain the widespread culture in the sector of talking about and sometimes acting disrespectfully towards the dead.
Poppy Mardell
So we were clear we needed a beautiful mortuary space on the ground floor with good access and parking, and inviting client rooms and office spaces for our living clients and teams. And it all needed to be together. In a busy city like London this was a challenge. Over a number of months we saw many, many, many sites. Beautiful shop-fronts with no provision for our dead clients. Large, logistically well placed industrial estates were unwelcoming for the public and the team and did nothing to help us lift the concept of death care as the special and beautiful work it so clearly is. Finding the perfect site for Poppy’s HQ It was amidst a sense of growing frustration that we heard of an opportunity in Lambeth Cemetery in Tooting - two recently renovated buildings were available following years of no or limited use. The match was immediate. It made so much sense. The first building, a gatehouse, gave us three beautiful, light rooms to welcome our clients with additional space upstairs for our team to work. The second building, a stunning 19th-century burial chapel, had of course been designed with regard for the dead as its founding principle. It was full of light and fresh air. Logistically it was also ideal. The doors were wide and welcoming to stretchers and coffin deliveries too. Of course there was work we needed to do to make the spaces habitable. Our natural approach to our dead clients means we didn’t need or want the chapel to feel unnecessarily clinical nor to smell of chemicals. So we laid down laminate wood flooring to feel as homely as possible. We installed a sink for hand-washing and built some free-standing coffin storage. And we wanted to give careful consideration to the experience of others in the cemetery around us. We built simple wooden screening around the doors of the chapel to protect the view of bringing people who had died into the building. And wonderful green-fingered members of our team designed and built stunning plant boxes around the screening to make it even more beautiful. We’ve been in the cemetery for five years now and it has been such an all round success. Two historically important buildings which otherwise were being little or completely unused are now kept warm and in good condition. Our clients can come somewhere peaceful, natural and beautiful. They can park if they are driving. They visit us in the Gatehouse where we have plenty of space. The meetings can take the time they need to take. If friends or family want to spend time with the person who has died, we walk them thirty metres to our chapel mortuary where we have a welcoming, neutral room where they can be together, decorate coffins, hold impromptu intimate ceremonies and religious rituals.
